Day two of Calgary Fringe Festival hits the motherlode

It was only Day 2 of the 2016 Calgary Fringe Festival and I think I may have hit the motherlode.

I’m excited when two of the four or five shows I catch in a day are exceptional, but to have four of them one after the other takes my breath away.

Talking about losing my breath, that’s what happened right off the bat when I went to the Inglewood Lawn Bowling Club to see Camilo Dominquez’s new magic show Supernatural.

He amazed and dumbfounded me last year so I knew pretty much what to expect, or at least I thought I did.

He does sleight of hand card tricks and some mind reading stunts, all the while entertaining with his wit and charm.

Camilo is a magician as astonishing as he is accomplished because this is something he has wanted to do since he was a child.

Raised in Columbia, he’s one of those super fortunate artists because his parents encouraged and sacrificed for him which meant sending him to Victoria at age 15 to pursue his education.

Eventually he would study magic and acting in Vancouver, New York and London, which means Camilo performs with his entire body.

He’s glib and mischievous and personable, which he needs to be because he enlists audience members to help in his illusions and card tricks.

You never feel threatened when he invites you to participate in a trick.

His acting training really comes to the fore when he pretends to have failed, especially in the mind reading stunts because what the supposed failure leads to is far more astonishing.

In one case his subject was asked to draw a picture and Camilo had already shown he could duplicate such drawings standing at quite a distance from the subject.

In this case the man drew a stool.

All Camilo could come up with was a number.

He’d already given another woman a dictionary to hold and asked her to find the page with the number he’s written.

There is was on that page.

The word stool had been circled.

People were gasping and applauding not realizing that some even more astonishing mind reading was on its way.

I can’t encourage you strongly enough to take in one of Camilo’s remaining fringe shows which run at the Inglewood Bowling Club July 31 at 3:15 p.m. and 8:15 p.m. and again Aug. 5 at 8:15 p.m. and Aug. 6 at 3:15 p.m. and 8:15 p.m.

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Still shaking my head in wonderment, I headed off for the Artpoint Gallery to see Jeff Laird’s new solo show The Jupiter Rebellion: A Zach Zultana Adventure.

I was prepared to be a little disappointed because Laird’s 2013 The Show Must Go On remains one of my all-time most memorable fringe experiences.

Laird’s father runs a touring children’s theatre company out of Victoria and, for as long as Jeff can remember, he had heard horror stories from the actors about such tours.

He wove those stories into The Show Must Go On, which is one of those monologues that fits the performer like an expensive leather glove made for him.

It’s a tour de force for Laird because it seems to be him channelling some supernova version of himself.

His new show The Jupiter Rebellion is a big budget science fiction movie about a rebellion on a mining colony that orbits the planet Jupiter.

As with countless such sci-fi adventures, a hero rises from the shadows to right all wrongs and win the heart of a beautiful woman.

When I chatted with Jeff at the fringe artists’ meet-and-greet, he explained Jupiter is “in the style of a big budget sci-fi movie but it’s all done by me using only a chair and a stool.

“I wrote the show with Ron Fromstein. Between the two of us we’ve watched a lot of Star Trek, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica so there are some references to those series in Jupiter but you don’t need to be a sci-fi addict to get the humour in the show.”

What Jeff did admit was “once the show begins, I don’t stop talking or moving for 60 minutes.

“I don’t know where I get the stamina to do it except to say I think I feed off the energy of the audience.”

The audience I saw Jupiter with bought into Jeff’s manic storytelling style immediately, so he was getting a great deal of feedback which might explain why Jeff seemed like that little Tasmanian Devil from the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

To give himself some breathing room, Jeff has created a few laid back characters, like the hulking Russian miner and the seductive beauty who just happens to have her own jet plane so she can whisk Zack away from his drudgery for a couple of days.

There’s a great fight between the chief mining executive and Zach that starts as a verbal shouting match and ends with fisticuffs on a gravity floor.

I particularly liked the way Jeff-the-narrator explains the filming techniques in this movie.

It’s like having one of those special DVDs with the director’s commentary, and Jeff is more a self-congratulatory James Cameron than the auteurish Steven Spielberg or George Lucas, so it’s a hoot.

The thing about seeing a Jeff Laird show is that you really do need to have a leisurely walk, a drink at the bar or a bowl of Vietnamese soup (or all three as was our case) before seeing your next show.

It just wouldn’t be fair to the next artist if you didn’t come down from you Laird high.

We couldn’t have made a better choice for post-Laird than Keara Barnes’ Almost a Stepmom.

Try to get into the Lantern Church Basement as soon after the doors are opened as possible, because Barnes has an improvised warm up routine that is meant to put you in the mood for her tale of lost love, and boy does it ever.

Barnes never comes out and says it directly, but I think the drunken, foul-mouthed flirt on stage is none other than the former wife of the man Barnes met and fell in love with in Ireland.

With Almost a Stepmom I knew I was in for a treat because I’d chatted with Barnes at the artists’ meet-and-greet, and she is one vivacious young woman and a born storyteller.

She assured me that Almost a Stepmon “is really a true story with slight embellishments.

“My mom is Irish and we used to visit our relatives there and I fell in love with the country.

“When I finished school I decided to movie to Ireland for six months, which turned into three years.”

Ireland, as those who have visited the Emerald Isle know, it is a place ripe for love.

As Barnes explains in her solo show while acting out all the characters, she fell in love with a great guy who had a beautiful preschool daughter and an ex-wife who Barnes refers to only as She Who Cannot Be Named, and you soon find out why.

As is essential, the characters Barnes plays are beautifully distinct.

She portrays herself as timid, and often on the edge of total disbelief, as when She Who Cannot Be Named spills the day’s garbage all over her.

The ex-wife is like some Samoan volcano, always on the verge of exploding, and when she does it’s not a pretty sight.

Barnes lets us see that it is the alcohol that makes her such a vindictive person, which is particularly kind when you see what a monster she can be.

When Barnes plays the little girl hugging her teddy bear you understand who the real victim is in this story, and I think that is why Barnes packed it in and moved back to Victoria.

Her explanation to me was that she was “just 22 years old and not into her games.

“I just wanted to hang out with my boyfriend, but she was determined to mold me into the role of the evil stepmother.”

In our chat, Barnes never had a bad word to say about her Irish beau, but she does paint him as rather ineffectual when she brings him into a scene on stage.”

Barnes told her parents what happened in Ireland, but she is still leery about them seeing her show so she didn’t let them see it at the fringe in Victoria.

“They’re ready to see it now so they are coming out to see my last show in Calgary, and then will drive me back to Victoria.”

Barnes went back to Ireland and met up with her former beau and did the show for him.

“His reaction was amazing, but then he was always as supportive as he could be under those horrible circumstances.”

She Who Cannot Be Named has not seen the show, but mutual friends drew her attention to reviews of it posted on the Internet.

To see how she reacted you’ll have to catch Almost a Stepmom at the Lantern Church Basement July 31 at 2 p.m., Aug. 1 at 5 p.m., Aug. 3 at 5 p.m., Aug. 5 at 8 p.m. and Aug. 6 at 2 p.m.

Spending 30 minutes with Keara Barnes is so much fun you’ll wish she’d spun this tale out into a full hour.

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I ended my day as part of a packed crowd at Festival Hall who’d come to hear Paul Strickland spin some more of his trailer park tales in Ain’t True & Uncle False.

He spun straw into gold last year with Tales Too Tall For Trailers so it’s understandable that people’s appetites were whetted for more down South humour and songs.

Strickland has always reminded me of a young Burl Ives.

That voice was made for singing and telling stories and he has the same kind of personality that you warm to so easily.

Like Ives (the singer and not the actor in his explosive film roles), Strickland seems so at peace with himself and so confident in his storytelling.

When he does jump up on a chair to act something out it seems like acrobatics for such a laid back performer.

Strickland grew up in a trailer park in Alabama, so you know he’s created characters based on people he knew, but like all great storytellers he’s made them larger than life and just as lovable.

In Strickland’s fairy tale, these characters all live in Big Fib Trailer Park, which should let you know just how tall some of these tales will get.

Besides his own Aunt and Uncle, there’s Will Perjure, a guy who just lost his left hand one day.

He put it down and forgot to pick it up, but as with all great storytelling that hand will make an appearance before the hour is out.

This losing a hand would be a tragedy anywhere in the world, but doubly so because the sole industry for the inhabitants of Big Fib is the local pea factory, where they turn green peas into black-eyed peas by punching them with the left hand into the cupped right hand.

Much to Will’s dad’s dismay, poor Will can never have a livelihood unless dad can figure out a way his son can punch peas with just one hand.

I vowed I would not tell you what Old Man Perjure came up with because it makes for one of the funniest visuals in Strickland’s story.

Will Perjure did find a way to make himself useful and it has to do by making gardens where nothing grows.

Two of my favourite Big Fib residents are Faye and Bri Kation, Siamese twins born 18 months apart, and no I’m not about to tell you how that’s possible.

I’ll let Strickland do that because few people could spin that yarn as slyly as he does.

You can learn the secret of the Big Fib’s Siamese twins and many more delicious tidbits at Festival Hall July 31 at 5:30, Aug. 1 at 9:30, Aug. 3 at 7:30, Aug. 5 at 5:30 and Aug. 6 at 7:30 p.m.

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